Why You Need to Pause

When you think of cities such as Silicon Valley or Tokyo, you think of people who are constantly hard at work trying to build the future. In a world where productivity is maximized and your life is seen as something to “hack”, there is no room to just sit still and smell the roses. Your body and mind is a tool that can be optimized. There’s a cost to living your life on the cutting edge, one paid in pressure and stress.

On the other hand, you have places like Arenas de San Pedro in Spain. Artificial intelligence isn't the buzzword in conversations, and its residents couldn't care less about what the latest exponential tech is. The purpose of their conversations is not to discuss their latest projects and build their “network” but to connect with each other. This community doesn't jump from one thing to the next. They value the present moment.

Arenas may seem like it’s in the past given that there has been little to no technological development for decades, it doesn't feel backwards. After visiting, I found myself feeling like a human being again, real and meaningful. If you're interested in what the residents of Arenas de San Pedro are fascinated about if it’s not blockchain, it’s olive oil. At the end of each year, residents gather their harvest from their olive groves and head to the olive press in the middle of town.

Everyone waits to get their olives pressed, which takes hours, but no one complains. People take the time to pause instead of always being in a hurry. Most of us can’t drop our lives and move to an unknown part of Spain, trading the fast-paced life for olive groves. But we can take some lessons from the Spanish and learn to just pause.

The value of pressing pause

In the modern world, being busy is a metric of being ‘successful’. If you are not busy, you’re being lazy and wasting time. When people see an empty space in their Google calendars, they rush to fill it up with something to maximize the hours in their day. It doesn't matter if it’s sending emails, replying to text messages or setting goals.

We often treat the human body as a machine. We want ourselves to work as fast and efficiently as possible. Machines are often designed to function like this, but people are not. We often praise those who are ‘always on’ and give them respect for their hustle. In a world of email and text messaging, we demand instant replies. We value the speed of the message, then the actual quality of the text or response.

And if we want to take a pause, it’s associated with reduced productivity and procrastination. Machines don’t even pause to reflect and ponder on their lives, so we shouldn't either.

What is a pause

It’s a period of time when your mind and attention are free to roam. It can come in many different forms but it’s definitely not an empty space in your calendar or dead time. It’s the five seconds you spend dwelling on a question, the hour spent reconnecting with an old friend, or the one-year sabbatical you take from work. It’s a break from your rhythm, whatever pace you are going at or however long the pause might be.

When you press pause, your thoughts don’t shut down and your mind is not empty, you just give yourself the space to think about other thoughts and pay attention to things you overlook. Not to get confused with meditation, where the mind is getting trained to become mentally clear and calm. Think of a pause as a moment of reflection to just “think”. Bill Gates goes on Think Weeks every two years.

Pauses don’t have to last a week either, they can be when you are waiting in line for coffee or the train on your morning commute. Two minutes or even two seconds can make a difference.

Pausing improves creativity and relationships

Although taking a pause involves us taking a step back from achieving our goals, it’s actually a way to get there faster. Creative director James Foster explains how the people he studied when looking for creative advice all had some element of a pause in their life. Some artists call it a period of mental digestion others call it incubating their ideas. They all disconnected from the task at hand. The time they took out being conventionally unproductive ultimately worked like they were being productive. Their creative pauses helped them keep their new ideas fresh as they are often fragile and get crushed under the weight of our daily concerns.

In relationships, it’s often difficult to understand what another person’s perspective is, what they want, and what they are thinking of. This is where pausing can help. Silence makes people uncomfortable — so much that they can’t help but fill it. By saying ‘So…?’ after a person’s response, it creates a pause that the other person will eventually break by voicing what is on their mind. So if you want to deepen your relationships, try talking less and pausing more.

Pausing also helps when you are trying to make a judgement call. If someone asks you a question or you get a text/email, take a moment to pause before trying to respond immediately. Most people might feel mental pressure to respond quickly, but by pausing you have time to articulate your thoughts. In my personal life, I tend to give delayed responses to let myself think of a quality response that has value and meaning, rather than trying to respond right away. It’s not that I want to ignore the person, but I value quality over immediate satisfaction.

If you are still not convinced of the importance of taking a pause, let’s take a look at a musician playing his flute. He has to take short pauses as he plays in order to breathe. He then blows air into the flute. Without pauses, music would not be possible or flow (if you’re a classical music fan check out this piece).

A different kind of pause can be observed in composer John Cage’s piece 4'33". Cage doesn’t play anything for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Instead of empty silence, the audience hears background noises they usually ignore. They spend those four minutes listening to the subtle music of everyday life.

Escaping the daily grind

The world is addicted to being busy but taking breaks will improve your creativity, relationships and judgement calls. Some actionable advice? Borrow pauses from other cultures. The Jewish faith stipulates that Saturdays are a day of rest, known as the Sabbath. Implementing your own version of a Sabbath, it gives you something to look forward to after a stressful week of juggling responsibilities and trying to meet weekly goals. Meditation is also a great practice to use for pausing. Sitting down and writing this article was a form of a pause for me.